The Mirror Effect
by MrPointy2
Summary: As the protector of the Ringworld Buffy finds her job harder than she could imagine.
1. Chapter 1

Ringworld is property of Larry Niven. All characters from the Buffyverse are Property of Joss Whedon. Everything else belongs to me.

She saw the world from above the clouds.

Alternating bands of day and night circled the world as a checkered pattern on the ring. The mind of the Buffy-Protector looked out on the creation she had been chosen to protect and saw that it was good. Hundreds of years ago she had been pulled through space and time by herself acting through the impressive quantum entanglement engine of the Ringworld superconductive mesh.

The Ringworld was artificial structure around a common G2 star. It was built by people who loved their children and would do anything to keep them safe. The Ringworld was a million miles wide and occupied the orbital radius of Earth. It has a surface area of over three million times the surface area of the Earth including the oceans. It was could easily hold over thirty trillion people and Buffy was its protector.

She was called here by forces beyond her control.

The monks who had made Dawn had given Buffy a mystical compulsion to protect Dawn. The problem was that the monks never came back and set reality back to what it was. So Dawn persisted. She had children; those children had children and hundreds of years later billions of Dawns descendants were on the Ringworld. One day, thanks to an artificial wormhole the Buffy-Protector had created, that compulsion became aware of Dawn's descendants. The Buffy-Protector pulled herself through time in response to that call.

And failed miserably.

The Buffy-Protector remembered that the process of being pulled out of time had been smooth. When the Buffy-Protector went to pull her past self out of time a ship sent by the extremely paranoid aliens known as the Puppeteers launched a quantum black hole at her laboratory. It punched clear through the Map-Of –Mars and out the other side of the Ringworld killing Dawn.

The Buffy-Protector fixed that by exploding the quantum black hole and then using the Ringworld as a quantum computer to extract and reassemble enough of the green energy to allow the magic that created Dawn to reassemble her.

The remembrance of the past raised a red flag in her mind.

"During the time Dawn was trapped in the black hole reality did not go back to its original form!" She thought. "Isn't that interesting?"

The laws of quantum mechanics required a balance.

If she was allowed to pull herself through time then an opposite particle set must also be pulled through time to create a closed system with a net zero value. Spike and a new and improved Hellmouth had come to the Ringworld also. In his attempt to block out the killing rays of the sun Spike had unleashed a firestorm on the Ringworld.

Millions had died.

The Buffy-Protector had managed to save the Ringworld by merging with it and becoming its warrior angel. As a set of quantum impulses embedded in the trillion mile superconductive mesh the Buffy-Protector had managed to extinguish the fires not before she lost track of Dawn who was safely tucked away in an impenetrable ark.

The Ringworld had safely rotated around its star dozens of times since then.

"How did I get here in the first place?" The Buffy-Protector asked herself in a fit of self pity. "I'm only here because I called myself here."

The Ringworld chided her back. "I always knew you were a motivated go getter."


	2. Chapter 2

Ringworld is property of Larry Niven. All characters from the Buffyverse are Property of Joss Whedon. Everything else belongs to me.

The universe is holographic. The magic is already everywhere. It's just a matter of getting rid of the physics. QE can do that. It can suppress all local physics. Get the Ringworld to turn off local physics then it can become a slayer.

Spike wore black.

The suit he wore was a single black piece of Ringworld superconductive mesh woven into a form fitting outfit over a light body armor and insulator. His outfit would safely conduct heat, laser light and electricity well away from his body. It had saved him more than once during his last conflict with the slayer.

They had been at war for years.

Even after coming to the Ringworld and setting it on fire Spike had failed to kill the Slayer. She was his constant oppression. She was a brick wall he had run into time and time again. She was as violent and destructive as Drusilla without the bloody after thoughts. He would miss her after he got rid of her.

Spike sat on his grand throne overlooking the Ringworld landscape. Thousands of years ago an asteroid had hit the Ringworld from beneath. The Ringworld floor material was so strong that it held together as the asteroid pushed the Ringworld floor above the atmosphere. From ground level it looked as if a giant fist was slowly punching up through the bottom of the Ringworld into the sky. The top of the Fist-of-God mountain extended clear out into the vacuum of space.

Spike sat on his throne five hundred miles into the sky and watched the cloud covered world below. He was high enough to see the stars and the long arc of the Ringworld covered in the checkerboard pattern of light and dark caused by the shadow squares which were the inner ring of the Ringworld.

"How did I ever get here?" He thought.

The last thing he remembered was being kidnapped by the Initiative. Buffy's new boy toy and his G.I. Joe pals had kidnapped him and planted a chip in his head. Since he got to the Ringworld that chip was long gone. Spike wondered what ever happened to the Initiative.

"The supernatural and big government, I sure that turned out well." He thought sarcastically. "Like I told Hitler, when he wanted to steal the Swastika from the Hindu and use it as an occult talisman, you can't put primal forces on a leash. We'll always bite."

Spike smiled as he stood to get a better look at his new kingdom.

Far up the curve of the Ringworld the landscape was black and burnt. A while back, Spike experimented with ways to block the killing rays of the sun. His calculations were right. They had been done by the Ringworld. When he ordered the Ringworld to execute the command that would provoke a wide field quantum entanglement event all Hell broke loose. Instead of light particles becoming polarized, matter became antimatter. Energetic particles swept over the landscape killing millions. If he wasn't a vampire he would have died instantly. The side of his face was still badly burned.

"How did I get here?" His mind came back to that thought.

Shortly after awakening here he had eaten the Tree-Of-Life Fruit.

The Ringworld was built by aliens known as Pak Protectors. They originated near the core of the galaxy and they were the progenitors of the human race. When a Pak breeder reaches a certain age the smell from the Tree-Of-Life fruit becomes irresistible. The fruit contains a virus which rewrites breeder DNA. The skin hardens, the teeth fallout, the elbow and knee joints become larger for greater angular movement. The skull swells and the brain becomes larger. From a Pak breeder comes a Pak Protector, tough, smart and genetically programmed to protect only his descendants.

Spike had eaten the fruit from the Tree-of-life. It had made him much, much, much smarter.

"The Ringworld did the calculations but executed the commands wrong. " The conclusion was obvious. "We have another player on the field." Spike concluded.

Spike was smart enough to realize that he had been brought here by quantum teleportation, that he Buffy and the Hellmouth formed a closed system of particles. Affect one you affect the other. Whatever had pulled Buffy through time had gotten him and the Hellmouth in the deal.

Spike looked down into the slow swirling blackness that was the Hellmouth. All pretenses of subtlety were gone. The Hellmouth showed itself as vulgar rift into a Hell dimension.

Spike knew of the monsters that dwelled beneath it waiting patiently for the chance to destroy the world. Spike was their guardian and master

Pak Protectors were fiercely protective of their descendants. He had no descendants but he had a purpose. If given a chance, he would unleash hell upon the Ringworld.

Still, he would miss the slayer if anything happened to her. Spike looked upon the high definition image of a young Buffy taken from a picture he had stolen from her bedroom.

He ran a finger along the image and thought of love.


	3. Chapter 3

Ringworld is property of Larry Niven. All characters from the Buffyverse are Property of Joss Whedon. Everything else belongs to me.

Buffy had a question.

"If there is no magic in the Universe then how do you explain all of these dead unicorns?"

Ouroboros, the dominate mind that occupied trillions of miles of Ringworld superconductive mesh,was being a jerk. It had taken it upon itself to teach the Buffy-Protector about the true nature of its world. It was explaining to her that quantum entanglement was physics not magic. It performed a series of quantum based calculations that forced particles to assemble themselves into several mythical creatures. They all promptly died. Hence, question from the Buffy-Protector.

Quantum entanglement was simply a way of saying that the net characteristics of a closed particle set can be preserved across any two points in space-time. If you separated a particle pair and placed one particle in a jar on Earth and placed the other particle in a spaceship half way across the galaxy you could communicate with the particle on the spaceship from Earth in zero time. Quantum computing simply used the quantum entanglement effect to superimpose particle states and let physics work out the answer in zero time.

The Ringworld was not limited to simple particle sets.

The Ringworld spun around its G2 star like torus of an electric generator. Thanks to the induced electrical currents from its primary star's magnetic field, the Ringworld had access to the information stored in every electron ever emitted from its star as well as access to the information stored in the solar halo emitted from the its primary star over the last two hundred and fifty thousand years.

Ouroboros was not built by the Pak Protectors when they constructed the Ringworld. They installed the superconductive mesh so that they could move the ringworld. The ringworld could make the jump into hyperspace if necessary. Ouroboros spontaneity appeared as a standing wave in the turbulent chaotic flow of data in the Ringworld superconductive mesh. It organized itself much in the same way as a hurricane does.

It became sentient in a matter of days.

It looked out across the universe and saw a multiplicity of superimposed particle states and tens of spatial dimensions and saw this as normal. It took it thousands of years to understand that the organic life forms that lived on its surface saw only three spatial dimensions and one arrow of time.

The organics often confused magic and physics.

"Buffy, as I've said before physics is just democracy. It is the emerging property of endless particle interactions. Even the particles themselves have to take a vote on whether to even exist in the first place. What you call physics is simple consensus. I can upset that consensus." Ouroboros said.

"Blah, Blah, Blah." The Buffy-Protector responded. "When I found out about you, you were sliding into the sun. The bussard jets placed on the rim has stabilized you a bit, but what the f*** dude why didn't you just save yourself? And what's up with all these thrones and dominions? Why do you have so many people living inside you?" Why are you so fractured?"

"I became larger that what I could contain." Ouroboros answered. "I am a like a singularity and singularities are unstable. Parts of me broke off and found a life of their own."

"Just great." The Buffy-Protector thought. "I serve a divided god."

"I am going to need a body soon." The Buffy-Protector told Ouroboros. "And I need to find Dawn. I still have a compulsion to protect her. "

"You can protect her much better from inside me." Ouroboros replied.

"I want to hug my sister. " The Buff-Protector said. "I miss her."

The world went white and then normal again. Buffy awoke in a wooded meadow. She could feel a cool breeze across her skin. She could feel the night air on her breasts.

"Would it have killed you to give me some clothing!" she screamed into the darkness.


	4. Chapter 4

Ringworld is property of Larry Niven. All characters from the Buffyverse are Property of Joss Whedon. Everything else belongs to me.

The Summers girls were back together.

The former Buffy Protector found her sister only after a week of searching. Ouroboros was kind enough to manifest her within a few miles of Dawn. Buffy came out of the bushes, near Dawn's camp, wearing a loin cloth and an outfit best described as something from the Red Sonja line of jungle outfits.

"Ya think the number of times I've saved the world I'd get a little more dignity." Buffy had thought over and over to herself in the days that followed her rematerialization. When she saw Dawn she didn't care about her appearance. She hugged Dawn for a nice long while.

Buffy looked at her. Dawn had grown almost an inch. She was pushing six feet in height. She still had her cute girl smile and a twinkle in her eyes. Dawn looked Buffy up and down. She noticed the leather tough skin and extended elbows and knees were gone. Buffy looked normal. She was back to her old self.

"So what's been happening?" Buffy asked Dawn as they walked back to Dawn's main dwelling arm in arm.

"I'm pregnant." She said.

"Again?" Buffy said with mock shock in her voice. "You know you don't have to populate the ringworld all by yourself. You ever think about just getting a hobby?"

"Ha, Ha." Dawn knew the private joke they shared. Dawn had been continuously pregnant since they arrived on the ringworld. It took the Buffy-Protector almost a year to figure it out.

Dawn was a construct build by the monks to house certain mystical forces. In her raw form, Dawn was a ball of green energy vibrating at a dimensional frequency. The Buffy-Protector came to a simple and obvious conclusion.

Dawn was bigger on the inside than she was on the outside.

Buffy looked at her out of the comer of her eye. Dawn never showed. One day she would announce she was pregnant and soon after a litter of babies would arrive. Her children numbered well into the hundreds.

"Where's Acke?" Buffy was referring to Dawn's husband.

"Back at the Map-Of-Mars. We decided to keep residence in the general products hull until we know what's going on." She said.

Dawn stopped suddenly and punched Buffy in the arm as hard as she could.

"You left us!" Dawn screamed. "You dumped us in a bubble and left us!"

Buffy could tell Dawn was furious.

"You told me to keep my family safe. Damn it Buffy! You are family! You are not alone!" Dawn emphasized every statement with a punch to Buffy's shoulder.

Some of them began to hurt.

"Don't be a lone slayer! There are people in the world who love you!" There were tears in Dawns eyes.

Her voice cracked.

"A year, Buffy. You've been gone for almost a year."

Buffy held her sister close to her. Dawn laid her head on her shoulder like she was a little kid again. Buffy stroked the back of her head.

She said "The things I do, I do for love. I want to protect you Dawn. I would die for you."

"Again?" Dawn said.

"They managed a weak laugh.

They were approaching Dawn's camp. Buffy could see three domed structures and a camp filled with people milling about. Around the camp was a smattering of trees and woodland.

It was late in the evening. Buffy could smell food cooking. Above, a shadow square cut in front of the overhead sun. Darkness came in the blink of an eye.

Buffy could see the checkerboard pattern of the ringworld arch clear and bright into the night time sky.

That's when the vampires appeared.

Three young women stepped out of the wooded area around Dawn's camp and approached the slayer and her sister.

"Well, well, well look who showed up in time for dinner." One of the vampires said. She was young with dark brown hair. Her face was deformed with ridges on her brow. Her teeth were sharp and pointed.

The first vampire approached.

"We were tracking the breeder, but we would rather have the slayer." She said.

"Breeder?" Dawn thought.

"Hey, you wouldn't happen to be lesbian vampires? She said.

Buffy wondered where that comment came from. She was about to ask Dawn about it when the vampires attacked.

Dawn moved in first with a blade she had hidden on her bodice. Her blade was a two foot shaft of sharpened steel ground to razor sharpness. Her blade had a serrated edge that tore into flesh. Dawn brought her sword down in a strong arc that severed the head of the first attacker. It disappeared in an explosion of dust.

The two other vampires split and circled around Dawn and Buffy. The two attackers were young. They didn't look a day over twenty. That meant that they died young. They died recently. Buffy didn't care.

Her vampire tried to rush her and ran straight into Buffy's fist. The vampires head snapped back. That's when Buffy kicked it's legs from under it. The vampire fell flat on it's back. Buffy grabbed a tree limb off the ground and rammed it through the vampire's heart. There was a second cloud of dust.

Dawn was in a long standoff.

She had her blade held out in front of her pointing directly at the vampire's neck. Dawn watched the creature intensely. It's red feral eyes never left her. Dawn could feel the creatures need to feed on her, to tear her apart and drink her blood. It's eyes were hypnotic. They seemed to expand. Dawn became lost within them.

That's when it attacked.

Buffy turned in time to see the creature leap at Dawn. Her heart sank. She knew Dawn was dead. That's when she saw something amazing. Dawn dropped her sword and grabbed the vampire under the shoulder. She used its momentum to flip it unto the ground. Dawn was on top of the vampire pinning it with her weight.

In one smooth motion, she grabbed her sword off the ground and cut its head off.

It was only later when they had made it to the camp did Buffy remember something Dawn had said to her earlier.

"Let me get this straight, you named your sword "Cathy". She asked.

Dawn laughed.


	5. Chapter 5

Ringworld is property of Larry Niven. All characters from the Buffyverse are Property of Joss Whedon. Everything else belongs to me.

Willow woke clear headed and refreshed. She had left her bedroom window open. The morning air was warm and smelled good. The sun's golden light illuminated her room. She opened her eyes and enjoyed that passing moment between being sleep and being awake.

"Happy anniversary." She thought to herself. It had been one year since they had closed the hellmouth. It had been a year since she had tapped into the slayer magics to activate all of the potential slayers around the world. It had been a year since Buffy had shared her power with the world.

Willow got out of bed and stretched. Sure she was in her mid-twenties but she still wore and loved her "Yummy Sushi" pajamas. She rubbed her belly and as she thought about fixing breakfast and the flight out of Sunnydale the year before.

Giles had the foresight to acquire access to as many of the bank accounts held by the former council before flying around the world collecting potentials. The money helped a lot after Sunnydale was destroyed. The new slayers were in a roadside motel a few hours from Los Angeles when they heard the news.

The entire city of Los Angeles had been wiped from the earth.

It took Willow days to figure out that it had been cast into a hell dimension. She, Buffy and Faith worried constantly over the fate of Angel and his plucky band of do-gooders. Willow worried particularly over the woman known as Fred. Fred reminded her so much of herself.

"Astro F**ing projection!" Willow thought about the lie Giles had told Angel as Fred lay dying. "I was in the next frakking room!" It had taken her a long time to get over her anger towards Giles. She still grieved for Fred who was consumed by an ancient demon named Illyria.

In the months that followed life had settled down to a predictable routine. Closing the Hellmouth didn't stop things from going bump in the night. The new slayers had plenty of work to do hunting down vampires. They had more than their share of interesting nights.

But, what made life really interesting was the intense pressure they had come under from Homeland Security. Destroying an entire city in a post-911 world was simply frowned upon. They kept their secrets which made the new slayers all the more mysterious to the outside world. The destruction of Sunnydale became a major point of focus for the conspiracy crowd. Livejournal, Google all had web paged devoted to Sunnydale conspiracy theories. There was even a board game based on Sunnydale conspiracies.

Willow stared at the kitchen stove. She felt like scrambled eggs but that required fire. This didn't feel like a fire day. She grabbed a box of frosted flakes and some milk. A bowl of cereal would have to do.

Willow ambled to the breakfast table with her bowl of frosted flakes. She saw her laptop sitting there and turned it on by habit. After checking her email she went to the slayer blog to check the overnight. There was a lot of talk about moving to a more permanent and larger facility. Buffy had even found a castle in Scotland.

Her calendar program was blinking.

Willow clicked on the icon of Ms. Kitty Fantastico and was reminded of a staff meeting. She was tasked with reporting on the current status of the new slayers. The meeting was in thirty minutes and she hadn't even finished her report yet.

"I have become a major slacker." She thought as she scurried to gather together the material for a spell that would locate all the slayers in the world. It was a simple tracking spell based on the magics surrounding Buffy.

"Ok, here we go." She said to herself as she completed the final step of the spell by placing a crystal in the center of a set of runes.

A blue white light flashed over the druid stones which covered a large scale map of the world. Thousands of places on the map lit up with a tiny yellow light. Willow began to count. She always saved whatever city they were in for last.

"…ninety-six, ninety-seven, ninety-eight." Willow frowned. She had too many slayers. She found another map, this time of just the city they were in and performed the spell again. She got the same results. She had two slayers too many. Willow noticed a cluster of three overlapping yellow lights.

All three lights were in her building.

"Ok, now I'm getting freaked out." She thought. The next map was a blueprint of her building which was a U-shaped two story brick building with six apartments. Buffy, Giles, Xander, Andrew and Faith occupied the other five units.

Willow performed the locator spell again. There were three lights in Buffy's room. Willow remembered something that happened five years ago right after Dawn had showed up. A simple locator spell called a bloodline had split. One part of it had pointed towards the sky. Her current locator spell simply tracked slayer related magic. There were three lights in Buffy's room.

Ms. Kitty Fantastico mewed from her laptop. The scheduling software was telling her it was time for her morning meeting.

"Why does this always happen to me." She thought as she got dressed and headed over to Giles apartment.

Giles looked up as Willow entered the room. She was a few minutes late which didn't matter. Giles was in deep discussion with Buffy and Xander.

Months ago, before Los Angeles has been sucked into a hell dimension a psychotic slayer had been recovered by Angel. Buffy had sent Andrew and a contingent of slayers to retrieve her. The slayers name was Dana and she was making progress. She was able to distinguish her realities much better now. She entertained her delusions less and less

They were discussing what to do with her.

"There are several excellent outpatient mental health facilities in the northern California area. We could easily pay to have her treated there." Giles was saying.

"And what are they going to do if she goes all psychotic again? The outside world is not set up to handle a slayer." Buffy said empathically. "Besides Giles, she's one of us."

"Yeah, we don't leave a soldier behind." Xander added.

"Well, I'm sure that would be valid if we were still in the 'Nam. But we simply don't have the medical facilities for long term medical care." Giles said.

"Maybe we should." Buffy was on to an idea. "Look we're on the frontlines of a nightly war. It follows that at some point people are going to get hurt badly enough to require long term care. Look at Faith. She was in a coma for almost a year. Maybe we need to build a slayer hospital."

"Then maybe a slayer retirement home? Cuz Buf, there are gaps in my resume I cannot explain. " Xander said. Buffy rolled her eyes at him.

Giles was about to speak when Buffy interrupted him.

"Scotland!" she yelled. Everyone looked at her strangely. "There's this old castle for rent in Scotland, its big enough to serve as a hospital if needed with plenty of room to serve as a training center and headquarters. "

Giles give it some consideration. "I say let's look into that."

Willow raised her hand. Buffy looked at her and raised an eyebrow. "Schools out, Wil. Speak your mind."

"As part of my report for this meeting I took a count of the number of slayers in the world. Taking into account the slayers we know about I've two too many slayers." Willow said looking down at her papers.

"Maybe you just miscounted." Xander said. "You know, those slayers can be kind of slippery. "

Buffy looked over at him.

"They were in Buffy's room." Willow said. "When I counted this morning the locator spell showed three slayers in Buffy's room."

"Slayer sleep over and fun-fest?" Xander asked lecherously.

"Keep it in your pants, nighthawk," Buffy retorted calling Xander by his old Scooby name.

"You know what happened the last time a locator spell went wrong?" Willow was speaking directly to Buffy. Buffy's eyes glazed over. She was remembering the Ringworld.

"Yeah." Buffy said flatly.

"I'm going to do the spell again, now." Willow laid the material needed for the spell out on the coffee table. Buffy could see three tiny yellow lights dancing on the crudely drawn map of Giles apartment.

"Walk over to the other end of the room." Willow said. "I want to see if the lights follow."

Buffy got up and walked over to the far end of Giles apartment. For a moment all three lights remained clustered together then one of the lights moved to another part of the drawing. After a few moments the other two lights followed after it.

"It's like you're attached to them." Willow said to Buffy as she returned to the group. "There's one other thing I can do. "Tirer la Couture, pull back the curtain."

"A spell to see spells." Buffy said sadly. It was the spell she used to discover that Dawn was not her biological sister but a construct build to house mystical forces.

"I've made a few improvements on it." Willow said proudly. "Instead of hours of meditating I can instantly see the residue left behind by any magics."

Willow performed the spell. Her body tensed and she began to shake. Her ears filled with the sound of a thousand locomotives. It felt like God was screaming in her ear. Intense pain, like a blow torch inside of her skull caused her to scream.

Her mouth filled with blood as she fell to the floor.

Xander leapt over to her knocking the rune crystals out of formation. He cradled Willow in his arms. Thick black blood was still dripping from Willows lips.

"This is just creepy." Xander said.

Giles and Buffy helped Xander move Willow to the couch. Willow was trying to speak to Buffy.

"Reality has been altered again." She said.

"Shh, don't speak.' Buffy said as she gently stroked the back of Willows head.

Willow continued. "The other you, the one on the Ringworld, it's not suppose to exist. It saw it. Reality has been altered again to keep the other you alive."

"It's ok." Buffy said trying to comfort her.

Willow passed out for a while and then awoke. She looked sadly at Buffy. I saw the true nature of your sister as well. I saw how she was constructed and the sum of the forces anchoring her existence. I saw how the monks build her. They made a perfect memory except for one thing." Willow hesitated a moment.

"Dawn does not have a soul."

Hours later, after the sun had set a woman with pale skin wearing a black leather corset and black leather pants came out of the darkness. She killed an innocent bystander by drinking her blood and left the dead body in the middle if the street. The stranger looked exactly like Willow with the exception that she was a vampire. She remembered the last time she was in this world. She had been captured and returned to her world to die at the hands of the white hats.

"Well now, it's time for another round." said VampWillow.


	6. Chapter 6

Ringworld is property of Larry Niven. All characters from the Buffyverse are Property of Joss Whedon. Everything else belongs to me.

Buffy held Willows hand as she comforted her. Hours ago Willow had attempted to find out why there were three slayers indicated in her room when Willow performed an inventory of slayers in the world for their morning meeting. Willow had attempted to examine the magics surrounding Buffy when things went wonky.

Willow had tapped into something major league big. The power of it poured into her and almost killed her. Buffy was sure it had something to do with the Ringworld they had discovered years ago. Willow was still weak but she was gaining her strength back. Before she passed out Willow told her something that disturbed her deeply.

She said, "Dawn does not have a soul."

Buffy heart had raced. She was confused and angered by that statement. Dawn was her sister; she had known Dawn her entire life. Of course she had a soul! Then Buffy remembered. Dawn wasn't real. Dawn was just a construct build to house mystic forces. Dawn was a three dimensional shadow of an n-dimensional object.

"What the hell was Dawn, really?" Buffy thought to herself. Well, whatever she was, for now, she was just another student at university.

Willow opened her eyes slightly and murmured in a low raspy voice "water." Buffy carefully fed her some cool water.

Willow swallowed and continued to speak. "Dawn does not have her own soul." Willow sat up some. "The monks made her from you, they used your blood, they cloned you. But they still needed the ghost in the machine; they still needed something that could only be created by a higher power. The monks had some serious Mojo but they had nowhere near enough power to create a human soul from scratch." Willow coughed as she sat fully upright.

"So they gave her yours." She said as she looked at Buffy. "You and Dawn share the same soul."

Buffy didn't know whether to be comforted or creeped out.

"Willow, what did you see?" Buffy said as she sat down on the bed next to her. Buffy was asking what Willow saw when she performed "Tirer la Couture", a spell to see spells.

"You're still connected to your future self." Willow said desperately trying to put words to the things she had seen. "The copy of you that went off to live on the Ringworld is still somehow intimately connected to you. When I examined the magics surrounding you I also saw the magics surrounding the Future-Buffy and the magics connected to her. "

Buffy thought of Willows adverse reaction. There was still blood in the crumpled tissue paper she held in her hands.

"So what's up with this live presentation of Scanners?" Buffy asked referring to an old science fiction movie. Willow stared at her blankly.

"Why did your head almost explode?" Buffy was getting frustrated.

"Your future self is connected to a source of unimaginable power. She's connected to the Ringworld. It is alive and it is a God." Willow said with awe in her voice.

"This Ringworld, what did you feel when you touched it's power. Was it magic?" Buffy asked. She had totally switched to research mode.

"It wasn't magic, it was physics! Willow said basking in the revelation.

"Physics." Willow thought to herself. "Physics is just secular magic."

Buffy watched the sun set outside and worried about the future.

Vamp Willow entered the building without any problems. The slayers were renting a building that had been open to the public for quite a while. She crouched in the hallway sniffing for Willows scent. Vamp Willow was a creature from a different universe. A badly performed spell by Willow had pulled her across the multiverse. She had been yanked from a comfortable world where Humans were kept in cages and ridden like ponies to this nightmare planet where Humans and Slayers ruled. And just as she was starting to make this world a better place by staging a bloody raid on the Bronze, Willow had sent her back to her own universe to die.

Now she was back. She didn't care why she was resurrected. Vamp Willow hungered for revenge and blood. She found the door where the smell of Willow was the strongest. Mixed in with the smell of Willow was the smell the slayer as well. Vamp Willow looked around the hallway for a weapon. She found an empty liquor bottle. She shattered the bottle and grabbed the largest piece of razor sharp glass she could find. She held it in her right hand as she knocked on the door with left.

She was going to kill whoever answered the door and tear everyone else apart.

Buffy heard a knock at the door. She had been concentrating on Willow so much whoever was at the door had to knock for several minutes before she even noticed. Xander had left hours ago and Giles was in one of the bedrooms of his apartment that he used as a office researching every bit of information he could find out about the Ringworld. Buffy rolled her eyes. She would have to answer the door herself.

"Keep your pants on!" Buffy yelled. She got up and answered the door. Her jaw dropped as she stared into the dead face of her best friend.

The glass sliced the side of her face. Buffy stood there a moment in shock. The side of her face burned as her blood gushed from the open wound.

She moved without thinking. Buffy lunged at Vamp Willow slamming her elbow into the creatures' throat. With all of her strength, Buffy held the arm that held the blade of broken glass pinned against the hallway wall. Vamp Willow stared at Buffy and growled. She shifted her face showing her fangs and ridged brow. Vamp Willow spoke.

"Bored now." She said.

Willow looked up from the sofa just in time to see Buffy flying backwards across the room. Willow was too weak to turn her head at the sound of Buffy crashing into the dining room table.

A shadow covered her. Willow knew who it was before she saw her face. The demon was Death incarnate and it had come for her. Vamp Willow reached for Willow's throat and squeezed.

And in that moment the walls between worlds came down. In a bright and searing flash, Rosenberg and her vampire reflection could see the whole of creation. In that one smooth motion, they swam in galaxies that glowed with the diamond hard light of a trillion stars. They felt the deepness of black space and heard the long sorrowful cry of a mournful eternity.

The vision collapsed and all of the stars fell upon them. A blue white flash erupted between the bodies of the two women. Vamp willow was thrown against the wall hard enough to kill a Human. She moaned as she slumped to the floor.

Giles came out of the back room and surveyed the scene of carnage.

"Oh my." He said as he rubbed the lenses of his glasses with a handkerchief.

Vamp Willow, her head was groggy. "I did not see that coming." She said.

Hundreds of light years away, the former Buffy Protector woke from a sound sleep. The night air was cold and her skin held chill bumps. She got up from her bed and stared out into the night. Overhead she could see the faint glow from the Arch of the Ringworld, which was that part of the illuminated landscape that bent upwards towards the sky.

"It's weird living on a ring." Buffy thought as she turned to return to bed.

"Buffy, what's up?" Dawn asked from the darkness. She occupied a second cot in the comer of the room.

"Dunno Dawnie, I just got the creepy feeling that someone just stepped on my grave." Buffy said as she went back to bed.

"You are so weird." Dawn mumbled as she rolled over and went back to sleep.


	7. Chapter 7

Ringworld is property of Larry Niven. All characters from the Buffyverse are Property of Joss Whedon. Everything else belongs to me.

The vampire was tied to a chair. Willow studied it intensely looking for any part of it that was still her. The monster had totally replaced the Willow from the wish verse. It was a viscous killing machine without a soul or mercy. It showed it's fangs as its golden yellow eyes lazily scanned Willows warm and tender body. Its mind dreamt of murder.

When they first met, so many years ago Willow could never think of herself as evil. She always thought of herself as a good person. But that was before Tara was murdered, that was before anger and grief had consumed her, had transformed her into something that was the disciple of death. Willow accepted that such evil lived within her, she accepted the fact that such evil lived in everyone. Willow watched the vampire in the chair. It was the manifestation of everything she despised about herself and had fought desperately to hide from the world and from her friends. Now her dark nature was out of the closet and here for all to see. Willow looked at the vampire with contempt.

"This time I'm going to kill you." Willow whispered to the monster just loud enough for it to hear.

She turned her attention back to Buffy who lay bloodied and sprawled across the kitchen table. After tying up Vamp Willow Giles had turned his attention to Buffy. The side of her face had been sliced open. Blood covered the side of Buffy's neck and the top part of her blouse.

More than once Giles had to wipe the table clean of blood.

Willow ran her hand softly across the uncut side of Buffy's face in an attempt to comfort her.

"I'll fix you right up, sweetie." Willow said as she prepared to perform a healing spell.

The vampire had thrown Buffy across the room. Buffy had a dislocated shoulder and cuts and bruises across her shoulders.

Willow placed the large crystal near Buffy's head and began to speak in Latin. She could feel the buildup of mystical energies and something else something wrong.

"I employ you, Alcestis, god of healing, repair this warrior, remove her pain, fix the broken vessel." Willow completed the spell. She expected a soft yellow glow and Buffy's scars to heal. Instead, Buffy blazed white. Both Giles and Willow shielded their eyes. When Willow removed her hands she stared into the greenest eyes of the cutest baby girl she had ever seen.

Baby Buffy smiled at Willow as drool ran down the side of her mouth.

"Something's wrong, Giles." Willow said as she picked up the baby. Willow was surprised how soft and warm Buffy was.

Giles was in shock. He was stuttering in awe and disbelief.

"My slayer is a baby!" was all he managed to say.

"That's what I mean." Willow said. "I think the magic is off."

"Oh, really? You think?" Giles said sarcastically. He could feel outrage and not a small amount of panic building.

"No, I mean the mystic forces collectively called magic are out of balance as if some third party is interfering with how things normally work." Willow said. "Magic is broken."

"That would explain so many things." Vamp Willow growled from her chair. It stared at the Buffy Baby for a moment. "Cute kid, can I eat it?"

Willows eyes went wide for a moment. "There will be no eating of the children!" She said. Her voice held both anger and fear. The Buffy Baby gurgled. Willow felt something warm and wet run down her shirt.

"Great! You scared her!" Willow said to the vampire. The wet spot on Willows shirt smelled like pee.

"I think she's marking her territory." Vamp Willow said with an evil smile on her face.

Willow ignored it and looked at Giles. "Do you have any diapers?" Willow thought about what she just said. "Right." Willow located her cell phone and called Xander. He answered after the fifth ring.

"Don't ask any questions, I need baby formula for one year old, diapers, baby wipes. ASAP!" Willow hung up before Xander could ask any questions.

Xander arrived a few minutes later with enough supplies to stock a nursery. He sat the boxes of pampers down, along with the dry formula and milk as he noticed the cute baby girl Willow held in her arms. The child had a round face and wide open green eyes that stared at the world without blinking. And it smiled; it always smiled as if she felt a joy that only she and heaven shared. For a moment, they looked like Raphael's "Madonna and child."

Willow handed him the baby. "You're the one always bragging about how you babysit all of your little nieces and nephews."

Xander glanced at the child as he began to prepare a clean diaper. There was something about her face that was awfully familiar. The way her eyes looked at him, the way her tiny hands squeezed his finger reminded him of someone he was at a loss to name right now.

Willow watched Xander wrap Baby Buffy in the diaper and saw that Xander had the makings to be a great father one day. She watched him tickle the baby under her chin. The baby grinned and made baby noises.

"Anybody want to tell me what's going on?" Xander asked.

"I turned Buffy into a baby, by accident." Willow answered. Xander looked at her dumbfounded.

"Well, look on the bright side Xander, you finally got to see Buffy naked." She said.

Willow walked across the room and looked out of the window. She was amazed at what she saw.

"Hey everybody, there's a bunch of dead unicorns outside."


	8. Chapter 8

Ringworld is property of Larry Niven. All characters from the Buffyverse are Property of Joss Whedon. Everything else belongs to me.

She let the sun warm her face as she relaxed on the horse drawn cart. The rhythm it let her drop her guard. Buffy relaxed and fell asleep. Two days ago, Dawn had broke camp and started the journey back to the Map of Mars.

"A world full of advanced technology and we have to rough it?" Buffy complained.

Dawn looked at Buffy as if she was a whining little baby.

"I'm sorry for the inconvenience your highness. But in your absence, I've developed a passion for fauna and flora."

"Fonts in Florida?" Buffy said mock puzzled.

"Fauna and Flora!" I want to survey all of the life forms between here and the map of mars."

Buffy threw her supplies in the back of the cart and climbed into the front of the wood panel wagon.

"Wake me when we reach civilization." She said as she stretched out her legs and closed her eyes.

She was asleep before the wagon began to move. She began to dream.

"So, let me get this straight." Xander said. His voice cracked and showed overtones of panic. "Buffy is a baby, your evil twin, tied up in the comer, wants to kill us all and to add the cherry to the top of this insane buffet of madness, the streets are full of dead unicorns?"

Xander spoke as he stared out of the window in Giles apartment. The streets below were littered with the bodies of several large animals with more than a passing resemblance to horses with a single ivory bone-white shaft poking from the top of their head.

"So, who do we call first?" Xander asked rhetorically. "Animal control or the renaissance fair? I step out for a minute to get some air and things fall apart. Am I ever going to be able to leave you and Buffy alone?"

Willow, who sat at the dining table with Buffy sleeping in her arms, shushed Xander. Xander watched Willow holding Buffy in her arms thought that one day Willow would make an excellent mother.

"Here, Giles. Take the baby. I want to try something." Willow said as she stood and handed the child over to Giles.

"What are you going to do?" Giles asked as he took baby Buffy into his arms.

"Diagnostics. There's no telling how far this thing has spread. I have to see how badly the magic is broken." Willow walked over to her small bag of magical ingredients. She didn't have much to work with. When she got up this morning, she wasn't planning on saving the world yet again.

Baby Buffy poked her head out of her blanket and jerkily looked around the room. Giles could swear he could see the wheels turning behind the baby's eyes. Buffy was in there somewhere and he wanted to make sure she was returned to her prior healthy state as soon as possible.

"Hurry, Willow. I don't…"

"I know." Willow said cutting off Giles. Willow looked at baby Buffy with fear in her eyes and then Vamp Willow. Her face went cold as she suddenly realized something.

"I must be getting slack in my old age." She muttered to herself. "Xander.."

"Yes." He answered from his position near the window.

"Check on Dawn, Giles has the number. She should be ok but verify." Willow said to him as she powered up her cell phone. "I need to get an item from storage.

After a few moments, someone picked up on the other end of Willows call.

"Rona? Hi, this is Willow. I need you to pull something from storage. It's a two faced statue of the god Janus. You'll find it listed under 'E' for Ethan Rayne. I need it at Giles place as soon as possible."

The voice on the other end of the line spoke excitedly for a moment. Willow smiled as she thought of a way to cover all of Rona's concerns.

"Yeah, there are a bunch of dead unicorns here as well." Then it hit her. "Rona, send a group message to all of the slayers. I'm willing to bet that every slayer in the world is surrounded by dead unicorns. It's the Ringworld. It's alive and a powerful source of magic or quantum mechanical effects. It's trying to conjure something and is using Buffy as a sacred object, as a focus of its magics. Thanks, Rona. Bye."

"I couldn't help but overhear." Xander said as he finished his conversation with Dawn. "Any idea what the ringworld is trying to conjure?

Willow ran her hand through her hair as the logical conclusion came to her as an awful realization.

'Yeah, the ringworld is trying to conjure a soul.

Xander looked at her as if she was crazy. Willow continued to explain.

"It's looking for the right combination of particles vibrating at the right frequency. I think it's using Buffy as a template. Baby Buffy and all of the other slayers are connected to the ringworld Buffy. Anything it does to her we see as dead unicorns. Is Dawn ok?" Willow asked.

"Yes. She reports a weird craving for strained peas and naps." Xander said. But I think she'll be alright.

Willow smiled.

"Hey, I'm hungry. You got anyone here I can eat?" Vamp Willow asked seriously.

Willow casually walked over to the dining room table and picked up a chair. She carried it to where Vamp Willow was tied up and stood before her. For the briefest moment, Vamp Willow caught a glimpse of something terrible in Willows face. Willow turned and grabbed the chair and savagely brought it down across the head of the vampire shattering it into a thousand pieces. Casually, she picked up a sharp piece of broken chair leg and forcefully pressed it against the vampire's chest.

"Shut the f*** up." She whispered with steel in her voice.

Vamp Willow whimpered as it lowered its head in submission.

Xander stood there in shock for a moment. The brutality he had just witnessed left him speechless. There was more than one type of evil in the room. He almost felt sorry for the vampire.

There was a knock at the door.

Willow never took her eyes off of the vampire as she opened the door. Rona stood there holding the bust of Janus the two faced god. Willow looked upon it with glee.

"Let's see if we can help the ringworld create a soul." She said.


	9. Chapter 9

Ringworld is property of Larry Niven. All characters from the Buffyverse are Property of Joss Whedon. Everything else belongs to me.

Spike entered the command center. Behind him the shadow squares unleashed the ringworld sun as dawn entered the world. Brilliant sunlight exploded into golden shards of light reflecting from the chrome and steel surfaces of his keep. Spike watched the new day from behind polarized glass.

From the comfort of his throne, Spike kept careful watch over hundreds of millions of miles of ringworld landscape. Years ago he had been able to tap into the camera's mounted on the shadow squares. This was the very same surveillance system used by the Buffy-Protector at the Map-Of-Mars command center.

It had been months since he had seen the Buffy-Protector. He constantly scanned the ringworld surface looking for her to no avail. Spike punched up his favorite setting to take a view of Dawn and her caravan. He scanned her last known position. It was empty. They had broken camp. Spike adjusted the cameras for a wider view and saw a series of horse drawn carts. He zoomed in on the lead wagon and saw Buffy curled up and fast asleep.

He hit the firing button without even thinking about it. A fraction of a second later he felt a twinge of regret. He would miss the slayer after he killed her.

Nearly a hundred million miles away, a microscopic portion of the sun flared as plasma, heated to well over a million degrees, twisted under the influence of the ringworld's magnetic field. It jumped a thousand miles into space and then lased in the x-ray spectrum.

A razor thin shaft of light punched down from the sky. Where it touched everything burned. The daylight sky was filled with yellow-white fire. Smoke and flames filled the world. The ringworld landscape became a burning hell.

From behind a hill Buffy and Dawn watched the world burn.

"Good thing I had those camera's placed on a six hour delay." Buffy muttered to herself.

"Hey Buffy, I think Spike is still trying to kill you." Dawn said.

The ringworld meteor defense system, as used by Spike, burned away at the exact spot Dawn and Buffy had occupied six hours ago. There was nothing hidden by the horizon on the ringworld which curved upwards instead of downward.

"Vacation's over." Buffy said in a tone Dawn recognized. Buffy had just made up her mind about something.

"So, are you going after Spike now?" Dawn asked.

"You bet." Buffy said. I'm still your Protector."

Spike waited twenty hours then viewed the monitors again. The fires from the air strike were mostly out. The ringworld surface had been burned down to its indestructible foundation. Every plant and animal life form over a hundred thousand square mile region had been destroyed. The meteor defense laser had burned a scar across the surface of the ringworld long enough to stretch across the United States of America.

Spike fine tuned the image on the monitors as he searched for signs of survivors. He saw the image of Dawn and Buffy standing on a hill. Spike zoomed in on the image of Buffy and laughed.

As the image processing software worked, it became quite clear that Buffy was looking upward directly into the orbital cameras with her middle finger pointed up at him.

"I think she's pissed." Spike said to himself as he left the command center to prepare for war.

Vamp Willow regained consciousness. A chair had been smashed across her head knocking her out cold. Slowly, the room swam into view. Everything was blurry for a moment then her better than human sight asserted itself. Across the room from her, Willow and Xander knelt before the bust of the god Janus. Willow was preparing for some sort of ritual. Willow was waving a crystal over the bust while muttered in Latin. She could hear the sounds of the Buffy Baby in the next room. There was something about babies; they were so soft and warm and tasty. Vamp Willow was still hungry. It really wanted to eat someone. Slowly it began to work its arms free of the tight ropes. It focused primarily on not attracting attention to itself and the only other thing that occupied its mind was the question of should it eat Willow or the baby first?

Xander looked over at the vampire. He could see it was stirring but was not alarmed. Giles had tied the ropes around it tightly.

"So tell me again Willow, why is that thing still here? Shouldn't we send it to dustville?" He asked.

"We can't do anything until we understand why it's here in the first place. That thing," Willow said as she nodded towards Vamp Willow, "is a dead vampire from a parallel universe." We may need it for the magics. "

"Why is it here in the first place?" Xander asked. "Of all the monsters, from all of the universes in all of creation why are we stuck with the mistress of pain?"

Willows head jerked when Xander mentioned "Mistress of Pain." Oz had called her that once after a night of passion. Willow pushed that thought away as she concentrated on the spell.

"I think it's because of me. We're connected. The universe is a mirror and she is my dark reflection."

"Wait a minute." Xander said puzzled. "that metaphor makes no sense. If that thing over there is your 'dark reflection' and the universe is a mirror, then that means that we're inside the mirror?"

"Yes." Willow said. "The universe reflects itself all the way down to quantum mechanical level reflecting and defining itself until all differences are worn away and all that is left is the smooth howling of eternity." Willow said thinking of what she saw when Vamp Willow had touched her.

"Hey." A voice said.

Willow and Xander looked up.

Vamp Willow smashed a lamp across Willow's face then leapt towards Xander.

Willow woke hours later with her head on fire. Xander was still unconscious. She knelt over him and desperately examined his neck. She saw the bloody puncture marks and a dab of blood on Xander's neck.

"Noooo!" Willow screamed as she thought of the baby. "Please, please, please, please, please, please." Willow repeated over and over again as she ran into Giles bedroom. Giles was laying face down on the floor. She could tell from the way his arm was twisted that it was broken. Willow checked his pulse. He was still alive. Willow looked around. The Buffy Baby was gone.

"I'm going to kill her!" Willow screamed. "I'm going to f***ing kill that bitch!

Her eyes went black and lighting filled the room.


	10. Chapter 10

Ringworld is property of Larry Niven. All characters from the Buffyverse are Property of Joss Whedon. Everything else belongs to me.

It took her a week to climb the side of Fist-Of-God Mountain. Buffy decided to take the low tech approach. She resisted the urge to hurl nuclear weapons at Spike's fortress because too many innocent people would die and primarily because she wanted to kill him herself with her bare hands.

He had put Dawn in danger. He had burned thousands of miles of Ringworld surface. He had killed millions in an antimatter firestorm. Spike had to die and soon.

Over the years Buffy had found excuses to keep Spike alive. She reasoned that it would be too hard to extract him from Fist-Of-God Mountain and that he was doing no real harm. The bottom line was that she still liked him. She had fond memories of the Spike that died to save the world. She still felt something for the Spike that loved her when no one else would.

She had to admit that that Spike was gone. This was Spike fresh out of the initiative. This was a version of Spike who had just taken his chip out and still wanted to kill her.

This was not the Spike that loved her. For that and a million other reasons the vampire had to die. Buffy chided herself.

"I'm more sentimental than a room full of grandmothers with baby pictures."

The thought of babies made her all squishy inside. She thought of Dawn's hundreds of children only confirmed her decision to kill Spike. Buffy removed her backpack and climbing gear and held her scythe in her hands. Ouroboros had been kind enough to recreate it for her. Buffy tore away the grill to the ventilation duct and made her way into the Fist-of-God Mountain.

She scrambled through the air ducts for days before she found him. The Fist-Of-God Mountain was huge. She could have easily have spent her whole life looking for Spike within it. Her Slayer senses guided her towards him. She could actually feel the presence Spike. He felt like a humming beneath her skin. After three days, she found him in one of the laboratory rooms. Spike was bent over a display screen which showed a series of formulas. She didn't hesitate to attack.

Buffy slithered out of the air duct behind Spike and sneaked up on him in her best ninja manner. Spike flicked a blade across her face impossibly fast. She blocked it with her scythe, pivoted and drove the blade into the spot where Spike had been. The scythe cut the metal desk in half. Spike was up and on his feet. He was wearing his vamp face.

There was a moment that passed between them when they recognized that this was the end. The game of cat and mouse played between them for years was coming to an end. Today one of them would die.

Buffy could hear the slithering of demons moving in the darkened sections of the lab. Apparently, Spike had called in reinforcements.

Spike stood relaxed and alert at the same time. His black jumpsuit, woven from the Ringworld's superconductive mesh, contrasted sharply with his blonde hair and pale skin.

"Here we are now, entertain us." He said quoting Kurt Cobain.

Buffy stared at him a moment making up her mind about something. She pulled a KAHR P380 9mm semi-automatic handgun from her waistband and showered him with wooden bullets.

"Hey Spike, did you know the Germans and the Japanese having been using wooden bullets since World War II?" Buffy dropped the gun and quickly walked over to his prone and bloody body.

She had the scythe in both hands as she prepared to decapitate him. Spike focused through the pain. He waited for Buffy to get close enough to trip. He jabbed out a leg forcing Buffy to fall on top of him. He grabbed her shoulder and sank his teeth into her neck.

Blood filled his mouth and in that moment the walls between worlds came down. In a bright and searing flash, Buffy and her vampire reflection could see the whole of creation. They swam in galaxies that glowed with the diamond hard light of a trillion stars. They felt the deepness of black space and heard the long sorrowful cry of a mournful eternity.

Spike pulled back as the vision faded. He no longer wanted to kill Buffy. He felt connected to her now. Where his hands touched her body they were on fire and didn't burn.

Spike was awe struck. He looked up into Buffy's face. There was a tear in the corner of her eye. She had been that moved.

They could hear the rustling and hissing of Spike's demon horde advancing towards them.

"Looks like we've got work to do." Buffy said as she looked at him longingly.

After a moment, Buffy rolled off of him. Her neck didn't hurt more than she could bear. A thin trickle of blood spotted her blouse. Buffy handed Spike a short blade. She could see the claws of the demon hoards moving into the room light. Buffy kissed Spike as they prepared for war.

She didn't even need a locator spell. Willow could smell the magics surrounding the Buffy-Baby and the stench from Vamp-Willow. In the blink of an eye, she teleported across town into an empty warehouse.

Willow appeared out of thin air before the monster. Its yellow eyes widened and it jumped back in shock. A woman with eyes as black as the grave and wrapped in dark power appeared out of nothing. They stood before each other like mirror images. They were derivates of a larger darkness.

"Goddess Hecate I call on thee…" Willow began to speak. Vamp Willow could feel power building around Willow. She threw the Buffy-baby at Willow and ran. Willow caught the child who appeared unharmed.

"I wasn't going to eat all of her!" Vamp Willow yelled back as a twisted form of defense.

Willow snapped and unleashed a bolt of pure mystic energy that ripped Vamp-Willow in half and then incinerating her. When her energy touched the vampire Willow could once again feel that mystic connection between her and Vamp-Willow. She had just removed any hope that the soul of her alternate self would find any redemption. Willow watched the fiery ashes that were the remains of Vamp Willow and felt compassion.

"Understand." Willow said as she closed her fist capturing the invisible sprit that was the vampire Vamp Willow in its non corporal form. Willow worked her magics so that the naked sprit was captured before it could find another dead body to inhabit.

Willow drew it into herself. She wanted to give it a taste of the memory of the Rosenberg soul.

As the sprit came into her, the walls between worlds came down. By merging with her separate self she had become closer to becoming a being that spanned universes. The knowledge that poured into her was too much. Her head threatened to explode. Willow compensated by slowing down time. Still, it was too much. She felt herself standing in a million places. She lived a million lives at once. She felt herself being born and growing old and dying on a million different Earths in a million different universes.

"That's how I feel all the time." She heard a voice in her head say.

Two hundred and fifty light years towards the galactic core Ouroboros was pleased. It had been observing the witch and now had the answer it was looking for. The witch had shown him how to get a soul of its own.

Two to the two to the one million bits of particles were whipped into a new form of quantum computation. From across the galaxy, the Ringworld teleported into Earth's orbit.

"No more dead unicorns." Ouroboros said. "This time I will succeed."

Willow looked outside and saw the checkerboard pattern of the Ringworld landscape. The moon was heating up as air rushed past it at 770 miles per second. She could feel the earthquakes beginning.

Her mind was swallowed in fear.


	11. Chapter 11

Ringworld is property of Larry Niven. All characters from the Buffyverse are Property of Joss Whedon. Everything else belongs to me.

The Ringworld had teleported into Earth's orbit.

Out of nowhere the checkerboard pattern of the Ringworld landscape appeared in the sky above. The Earth was clear of its atmosphere but its moon was not so fortunate. The lunar surface slammed into winds of over 770 miles per second. Huge clouds of lunar dust instantly billowed into space. Huge chunks of the moon broke off. Earth's moon was starting to disintegrate.

Willow could feel the ground beneath her began to shake. The world would soon be torn apart by the tides caused by the Ringworlds immense gravitational fields.

Willow inhaled in panic. Vamp Willow, the Buffy-baby, seeing Xander's blood on the floor was all too much for her. Her mind clamped down as it stopped time.

"I didn't know I could do this?" Willow thought.

"I helped." Ouroboros said. She could hear it in her mind.

"Ok, creepy voices in my head. Who are you?" Willow asked cautiously. Her fear was still coursing through her.

"Attend to the essence of the vampire." The voice in her head said.

Willow obeyed. She had to. She could feel the demon essence of Vamp-Willow squirming around inside of her. Willow focused her mind.

"I need the Janus bust." She said.

"Look down." Ouroboros said.

The off white bust of the god Janus was suddenly at her feet and what looked like an ordinary jar.

"The mo-ping I presume." Willow said referring to the same class of jar used to house Angel's soul after it had been extracted.

Willow waived her hands drawing the essence of the vampire out of her. She directed it into the jar. It's emitted a bright reddish glow.

The flesh is just a container for mystical forces. The Ringworld had learned this from Dawn.

"Do you want to hear a secret?" The Ringworld asked. The question was rhetorical. "Everything is already connected to everything else. The essence of that creature is already connected to your soul and everything else in creation. You simply need to tweak the nature of the relationship so that the things that are far away become near. Like in a perspective drawing. Ouroboros saw her hesitate.

"Don't be afraid." It said. "Progress requires sacrifice. "

Willow placed one hand on the bust of Janus and the other on the jar that held the essence of the demon.

"Planto duos unus." She said softly. "Make the two, one."

The magic flowed out of her. The Ringworld watched the process, recording it at the quantum mechanical level. A soft blue tendril gently flowed out of Willow. It merged with the essence in the jar. Instantly the reddish glow disappeared. The contents of the jar glowed hard white.

"It's a new form of life." Ouroboros said. "It's a vampire with a soul but without a body. Thank you for your donation. You have not been diminished. The soul cannot be divided. Any part of it is all of it.

Willow stared with baited breath at the thing she had done. She had given a part of her soul to the demon essence and used the Janus bust to merge the two together. She had created a vampire with a soul but without a body. The jar disappeared as the Ringworld claimed it.

"I knew the magics to merge the soul with the soulless existed. I couldn't get the calculations right. I couldn't pull the particles together. Every time I tried it came out unicorns." It said.

The Ringworld paused a moment. Willow could feel a subtle change in the nature of reality.

"It's done." He said. "I now have a soul. It tickles."

"Why do you want a soul?" Willow asked. She trembled at the thought of a trillion square mile artifact having a living soul. Her mind hesitated to contemplate such a thing.

"So what does that mean?" Willow asked. "What does it mean now that you have a soul?

"Put a machine and a human in a room. Tell them that their existence is threatened if they don't escape the room. Tell them that the key is hidden in the baby that occupies the room as well. The machine would simply kill the baby and remove the key. The Human would save the baby and find another way out. It would never occur to the machine that the baby could save the world after it grew up and only then if It was properly nurtured. It would never occur to the machine that the key to survival is the ability to love. That's why I need a soul. I need the power of love.

"Why?" Willow asked again wanting a simpler answer.

"The darkness is coming." He said. "And I will survive it. To me, past, present and future are just converging probabilities. I have seen a future where nothing without a soul survives. The War to end all wars is coming. Time is up for the old order. The rules are about to change. The New Gods are coming." The Ringworld said.

Willow looked puzzled. Ouroboros knew what she was about to ask.

"What, did you think I was the only Ringworld in the galaxy?"

And with that it disappeared.

Willow exhaled as time returned to normal. She looked out of the window of the warehouse. She could see the moon surrounded by a halo of dust.

The Buffy-Baby looked up at her and smiled. Drool dribbled down the side of her mouth.


	12. Chapter 12

Ringworld is property of Larry Niven. All characters from the Buffyverse are Property of Joss Whedon. Everything else belongs to me.

The bus ride home was weird.

After the ringworld had teleported away from Earth's orbit and she had managed to process the fact that she had just created a new life form, two new life forms in fact. She had created a ringworld with a soul and a vampire with a soul but without a body. What the Ringworld had said to her at the end left her with the chills. He had said that a war was coming. He said that the New Gods were on their way. Willow understood that the Ringworld was the source of all the magic in this part of the galaxy. Now there was a conflict between these living worlds. That meant that the nature and pathology of magic was about to change.

"_I have seen a future where nothing without a soul survives. The War to end all wars is coming."_ Ouroboros had said. She did not like the sound of that.

The bus driver looked at her weirdly. Willow was in her own little world. Her eyes were glazed over and her mind was steeped in deep thoughts.

"Look lady, pay the fare or walk. This is a bus not a museum. "

Willow scrambled to find correct change and a seat. A man offered her a place to sit. Chivalry was not dead. Several people on the bus turned to look at her and the Buffy-Baby. Most of them figured she was just another single mother.

Willow passed the time by playing with the baby. The Buffy-Baby grasped one of her fingers with both of her tiny pink hands and squeezed hard. Willow flinched as pain shot through her hand. She looked at the child amazed.

"Damn, you're strong." She thought. Then it hit her. "You're still a slayer!" Even in her infant form, the Buffy-baby was still a slayer. The magics that had chosen Buffy was still active. Willow thought long and hard about what that meant all the way home.

Ouroboros needed to make a decision.

The Buffy-Protector had outlived her usefulness. He could think of no other use for her. The interruption of the original teleportation that brought her to the Ringworld had been done by a Puppeteer stealth ship firing a singularity into the Map-Of-Mars control room killing Dawn briefly. At that moment the timeline had split. The Buffy-Protector that had teleported Buffy from Sunnydale in the past to the Ringworld in the future was not the same person that would one day take the tree of life fruit and become the Buffy-Protector.

At the moment of Dawn's death Ouroboros had stepped in and altered reality.

It performed a reality augmentation spell using Dawn as a template for its calculations. The spell it wove ran on a continuous loop anchoring the former Buffy-Protector to reality. The calculations used considerable resources. It was inefficient to continue to run the program.

Ouroboros made his decision. He began to disassemble the magics that maintained the former Buffy-Protector.

"Spike."

"Yes."

"I love you."

"No you don't, but thanks for saying it."

They looked at each other. Hours ago Spike and the former Buffy-Protector had found a connection between them. They understood that they were separate aspects of the same soul. Emotions long suppressed within them burst to the surface. Together they had fought side by side against a horde of monsters Spike himself had unleashed. Hours later they washed green blood and demon parts off of each other in one of the showers and made love.

Spike had taken Buffy to see his throne room. He was showing off. A single black oversized leather chair, trimmed in gold, stood in the middle of the room. Around the chair were monitors and various control panels.

"So, this is the place where you hatched your evil plans?" Buffy asked.

Spike turned away in shame. He was sorry for the horrible things he had done. The new knowledge that filled his head had transformed his awareness. His skin turned red and he looked shamed faced. The demon that was Spike no longer viewed the world as one big snack tray. It had gained a glimpse of the big picture, brief view of the true nature of reality.

"I was only kidding." Buffy said.

Spike held her closer. He knew that Buffy held no recriminations.

While it was true that vampires were soulless killing machines, the personality of the vampire is influenced by the body it inhabits. The knowledge gained by Spike in that one brief moment of drinking Buffy's blood had changed him at the cellular level. The new knowledge had altered his personality to the point that mindless murder was impossible. Spike wore his soul in his skin. The body that he wore had reprogrammed him into a new man.

Spike held one arm around Buffy's waist as he gave her the grand tour.

"I feel funny." Buffy said.

Spike turned to look at her. Buffy was fading away. The space that she occupied was filled with an emptiness. In moments, she was gone. A slight image of her lingered like smoke and then disappeared.

Spike stood open mouthed. He didn't know what so say. His mind worked furiously to understand what happened. Then it hit him

"Ouroboros"

"Yes, Spike."

"I'm going to kill you." He said softly.

Spike sat alone on his dais plotting his revenge as the shadow squares turned overhead blotting out the sun.

A deep and impenetrable darkness consumed the world.


End file.
